Two months since launch
Posted: Thu May 05, 2005 4:49 pm
Darwinia has now been on sale for two months, which is amazing as the launch party seems like it was a year ago to me. A lot of stuff has happened since we launched and I thought it would be a good idea to bring everyone up to speed.
Sales of Darwinia have been good but not great. That's been the answer that i've given everyone who has asked, and its close enough to the truth. We'd guess web sales in the order of a few thousand units. Enough for us to stay working for Introversion and push on with our other projects, but not enough for us to start hiring and expanding and moving into offices. Or buying Ferarris. On the other hand, sales of Uplink have really shot up since Darwinia's release, which we imagine is because there are loads of people who've still never heard of it until now.
Magazine coverage in the UK has been awesome. Mark and Tom have really outdone themselves this time, netting us far more coverage than an indie game with no marketting budget would normally receive. We learnt a lot from promoting Uplink and this time I think we really got it right. PC Gamer alone have dedicated no less than 9 pages to the game. The reviews have been astonishing, giving us an average score somewhere in the high 80s.
The 1.2 patch for Darwinia has been launched and fixes most of the bugs that caused problems in the initial version. All in all the launch of Darwinia went considerably smoother than the launch of Uplink. We're also happy we managed to launch Mac OSX and Linux versions very close to the initial Win32 version. If I was a polititian i'd say things had improved greatly, but there was still room for more improvement. It would have been lovely for v1.2 to have been the launch version, but the reality is that it would have delayed the launch by another 2 months. At some point you just have to stop working and release your product, or you go bankrupt. This time around I think we launched not quite ready, but we would have released a patch much much sooner if there had been any serious bugs that needed fixing immediately.
Future patches will concentrate on modding facilities, and maybe, just maybe, multiplayer. Or as we've codenamed it within Introversion, Multiwinia. We are keen to point out this isn't quite the holy grail you might think it is....Darwinia does not really lend itself to multiplayer gameplay, due to its indirect unit control and massively overpowerful squaddies. If we went ahead with this project there would indeed be a player versus player battle mode, but this would be just one of many game types, and probably the least interesting.
After much pain and hard work, our new Web Store is almost ready to come online, hopefully within the next month. We've been relying on Worldpay all this time and its starting to show its age...there's no concept of a shopping trolley or checkout, no proper support for currency conversions, and it takes ages for us to get the money out of them. The Worldpay system we use just isn't suited to a company with multiple products. All of that will soon change with a modern web store tied into our very own merchant bank account. Crucially for us we get the money out much faster (cash flow is a huge issue at Introversion...we're only now starting to receive money from shop sales made in early March), and the shipping admin stuff should make Will's job much easier when it comes to posting your copies out to you. It also means we will be able to offer immediate online downloads of all of our products, which we've wanted to do since the very beginning.
We've received a lot of emails asking about the posters. We have every intention of bringing them back, but at the moment we are totally snowed under with work. It's difficult sometimes for me to keep in my head just how many projects Introversion Software are working on at the moment. We plan to launch two posters, both double sided. One side will contain a screenshot from the game in the same format as the old A1 poster. The other side will contain a specially designed (and very cool) graphical image. You'll see soon.
We are blown away by the Mods that have been released so far. The creativity on show is simply astonishing, and its fantastic watching people slowly learning how to use the tools. Some of the best things done have involved horrific abuse of the system to produce something very unusual. Keep your eyes on Icepick's site TheNextGame for the latest on Darwinia mods. Special mention has to go to Stricken Souls by The Goldfish, a quirky and fascinating journey through the Darwinian afterlife which turns the existing game story on its head.
I think that just about covers it. Thanks for listening!
Sales of Darwinia have been good but not great. That's been the answer that i've given everyone who has asked, and its close enough to the truth. We'd guess web sales in the order of a few thousand units. Enough for us to stay working for Introversion and push on with our other projects, but not enough for us to start hiring and expanding and moving into offices. Or buying Ferarris. On the other hand, sales of Uplink have really shot up since Darwinia's release, which we imagine is because there are loads of people who've still never heard of it until now.
Magazine coverage in the UK has been awesome. Mark and Tom have really outdone themselves this time, netting us far more coverage than an indie game with no marketting budget would normally receive. We learnt a lot from promoting Uplink and this time I think we really got it right. PC Gamer alone have dedicated no less than 9 pages to the game. The reviews have been astonishing, giving us an average score somewhere in the high 80s.
The 1.2 patch for Darwinia has been launched and fixes most of the bugs that caused problems in the initial version. All in all the launch of Darwinia went considerably smoother than the launch of Uplink. We're also happy we managed to launch Mac OSX and Linux versions very close to the initial Win32 version. If I was a polititian i'd say things had improved greatly, but there was still room for more improvement. It would have been lovely for v1.2 to have been the launch version, but the reality is that it would have delayed the launch by another 2 months. At some point you just have to stop working and release your product, or you go bankrupt. This time around I think we launched not quite ready, but we would have released a patch much much sooner if there had been any serious bugs that needed fixing immediately.
Future patches will concentrate on modding facilities, and maybe, just maybe, multiplayer. Or as we've codenamed it within Introversion, Multiwinia. We are keen to point out this isn't quite the holy grail you might think it is....Darwinia does not really lend itself to multiplayer gameplay, due to its indirect unit control and massively overpowerful squaddies. If we went ahead with this project there would indeed be a player versus player battle mode, but this would be just one of many game types, and probably the least interesting.
After much pain and hard work, our new Web Store is almost ready to come online, hopefully within the next month. We've been relying on Worldpay all this time and its starting to show its age...there's no concept of a shopping trolley or checkout, no proper support for currency conversions, and it takes ages for us to get the money out of them. The Worldpay system we use just isn't suited to a company with multiple products. All of that will soon change with a modern web store tied into our very own merchant bank account. Crucially for us we get the money out much faster (cash flow is a huge issue at Introversion...we're only now starting to receive money from shop sales made in early March), and the shipping admin stuff should make Will's job much easier when it comes to posting your copies out to you. It also means we will be able to offer immediate online downloads of all of our products, which we've wanted to do since the very beginning.
We've received a lot of emails asking about the posters. We have every intention of bringing them back, but at the moment we are totally snowed under with work. It's difficult sometimes for me to keep in my head just how many projects Introversion Software are working on at the moment. We plan to launch two posters, both double sided. One side will contain a screenshot from the game in the same format as the old A1 poster. The other side will contain a specially designed (and very cool) graphical image. You'll see soon.
We are blown away by the Mods that have been released so far. The creativity on show is simply astonishing, and its fantastic watching people slowly learning how to use the tools. Some of the best things done have involved horrific abuse of the system to produce something very unusual. Keep your eyes on Icepick's site TheNextGame for the latest on Darwinia mods. Special mention has to go to Stricken Souls by The Goldfish, a quirky and fascinating journey through the Darwinian afterlife which turns the existing game story on its head.
I think that just about covers it. Thanks for listening!
